


Accidentally in Love

by Draco_sollicitus



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Drinking, F/M, Otherwise Canon Universe, Past Child Abuse, Reluctant Soulmates, Soulmates AU, angsty, if that's a thing, rated t for cursing, soulmate mark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:08:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25192927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Draco_sollicitus/pseuds/Draco_sollicitus
Summary: Rey doesn't know who her soulmate is. It doesn't help that she no longer has a soulmate mark; it was taken away from her when she was a child.But, she knows what most of the mark said -- and the only person who might match her mark just so happens to be infuriating.Rey decides the best way to proceed is to completely avoid thinking about it (and to never, ever ask what his mark says). It's going to be fine.
Relationships: Poe Dameron/Rey
Comments: 63
Kudos: 255





	Accidentally in Love

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, if you follow me on tumblr you know yesterday was pretty rough and that I haven't been feeling much like Star Wars recently. But, I wanted to write something melancholy, and this idea has been sitting on my computer for months now, so I wrote a little something.
> 
> **warnings**  
>  An adult burns Rey as a child.

Rey has a scar that she doesn’t like to talk about.

It’s a scar on her arm that used to be a mark that she had a forever ago.

She was tiny - still so tiny, so big-eyed, so not-tired, so  _ young  _ \- when Unkar grabbed her arm and twisted it to read the scrawl of Aurebesh.

It was her fault.

“What is this?” Rey had whispered to one of the women who were cleaning the junk scrap up at Unkar’s shop. She had pulled back her arm wraps to show it off -- she’d been hiding it because it felt  _ right  _ to hide it. Like she was hiding treasure. 

The woman glanced down at it and tapped it. “It’s your soulmate mark,” she had explained, and Rey’s brain had fuzzed a little, memories making the shape of a pretty woman saying much the same thing to her before Rey had gotten  _ lost  _ and had been  _ left  _ and had forgotten who she was.

The memory had slipped right out of her brain before she could get a hold of it, disintegrating into sand.

“But what does it mean?” Rey’s head barely came up to the scrap table. At that point, Unkar only kept her around to crawl into the little places in junk hauls.

“It means that someone out there is going to love you so much one day.” The woman smiled at Rey’s answering beam, and she tapped the last whorl of the circular mark. “That says _ I know _ , and the rest looks like a name, maybe P-”

“What’s going on here?”

The woman dropped Rey’s arm, only for Unkar to grab it, and his meaty hand could wrap around her thin forearm more than once.

“Nothing.” The woman’s face lost all expression, and she returned to scraping sand off of a regulator. “Girl asked a question. I answered.”

“A question, huh?” Unkar’s mean little eyes squinted up as he looked at Rey’s arm.

“Let me go!” Rey kicked at his shin, but he only hauled her up so her feet left the ground.

“What’s this?” Unkar sneered as he examined her mark.

“It’s mine!” Rey shouted. “And it means someone loves me, and they’re going to find me, and I’m never coming back here, ever again!”

Unkar hooted with laughter, as did some nearby teedos who’d dropped off their day’s haul.

“You’re never going anywhere, girlie.” Unkar dragged her, kicking and screaming to his booth where his other hand scrabbled blindly on his desk, coming up with a hot piece of metal. “You’ll be here, working for me, forever. And no one is  _ ever  _ going to love you.”

“Let me go!” Rey screamed, kicking harder at him.

But it was no use. He was so big, and she was so, so small.

And she never learned what the rest of her mark said.

Now, all she has is a fat, ugly scar on the inside of her wrist that she hides under her arm wraps, and a faint, fuzzy memory of the two words that she’d been able to get before that part of herself was wiped away.

* * *

Now, Rey wishes she didn’t know them.

* * *

Rey tries not to look.

It’s a little difficult, not looking, because he always seems to be right there. He’s also usually wearing a jacket, which does make it a little easier to not look, because she can’t actually look.

She hasn’t met many people, she rationalizes after her first week with the Resistance. And those two words have to be so common. She needs to meet more people. That’s all. She doesn’t need to ask to see his mark.

He hadn’t even blinked when she’d introduced herself, only looked cocky and confident as he shook her hand; a second later, he’d turned away and talked to a few pilots, so it wasn’t like  _ he  _ was fixated on their meeting.

And, if she’s being honest, she doesn’t want to know because Poe Dameron is an obnoxious moof-milker.

“ _ Not like that _ !” is his favorite phrase when she’s flying an X-Wing.

_ “Who taught you how to do this?”  _ is the exasperated question when he sees her mods on the Falcon, and the follow-up  _ “This kind of work really needs a permit _ ” doesn’t do him any favors in her book, either.

_ “No one is going to take that from you,”  _ is what he says when he catches her hiding in a cranny on base, shoving protein rations into her face because  _ they gave her so much  _ and  _ what if someone realized they quadrupled how much she needed to function as a good worker?  _

Of course, there’s the almost belligerent imposition in her private moments, the casual touches to her elbow when he passes her in the hallway, the quiet smiles he gives her in approval when she doesn’t blow something up.

Poe Dameron might have a mark on the inside of his wrist, and he might not, and Rey couldn’t be more thrilled when she catches him kissing a pretty girl on base; he turns bright purple - a color she didn’t realize humanoids could turn - and tries to stammer an apology, but Rey shrugs and grins and skips away.

If he was kissing a person like  _ that  _ it meant that he  _ must  _ have found his soulmate. People didn’t just kiss like that with anyone.

* * *

Eight months after Rey joins the Resistance, she sits next to Poe when they’ve all hit the hull-stripper a little too hard. She feels giggly and loose-limbed, her near constant parsec-tall walls lowered, even if only a small amount.

Poe’s smiling drowsily as Finn tells a story, but when Snap starts in, showing off the soulmate mark on his bicep as Karé giggles proudly and takes off her jacket to show off her own, impressive bicep with Snap’s first words to her emblazoned on her brown skin, Rey’s chest tightens.

“What is it?” Poe mutters, knocking his shoulder into hers. 

“Nothing.” Rey’s fingers wrap subconsciously around the hidden scar on her wrist as she says it.

“Doesn’t seem like nothin’. What’s wrong?”

“It’s just…” Rey clears her throat. “Soulmates.”

“You don’t believe the marks exist?” Poe snorts and holds his bottle of hull-stripper out, gesturing to the now snuggling Snap and Karé. “Evidence. Pretty undeniable.”

“No, I know the marks exist.” Rey scoffs. “It’s more that - I don’t know if I want to believe that …”

_ That my soulmate is out there and I’ll never find them. That they’ll meet me and I won’t be enough. That they’ll find a way to leave, too. _

Poe fidgets with the rim of his bottle. When he next speaks, his voice is low. “Yeah. I was in love once. Real love.”

“Oh?” Rey blinks; maybe the pretty girl he was kissing wasn’t … “What happened?”

“We weren’t soulmates.” Poe seems to shake himself. “It didn’t kriffing matter. I knew I loved him, and he loved me. That was enough; nothing, no magic galactic poodoo or whatever, could stop me from loving him.”

A moment of quiet, and then: “But, the First Order? They could definitely take him away from me.”

“...Poe?”

“He died.” Poe sips from his hull stripper and coughs lightly. “Years ago now. It’s. Fine.” Another sip. “But, I loved him, and it was real, and no mark is going to take that away from me, or tell me who I can’t love, or who I have to love.”

“Right.” Rey hadn’t even considered that, being told what to do. She always figured if she found someone who was destined to love her, really love her, like no one ever had -- well, Rey wouldn’t turn that person away even if it did terrify her.

“You get it.” Poe bumps her again. “I know you get it.”

“I do?”

“Yeah.” Poe stares at her. “...You do. You’re like me, you’re stubborn and independent and you don’t like following stupid orders, even if they’re from the universe.” He coughs again, nervously this time. “You know. I mean… You’re … Rey?”

“I don’t know.” Rey offers him a tight smile. 

Something about her words makes the lightness in his face shutter; he excuses himself and walks out of the party. 

When she sees him the next day, Poe’s nursing a hangover larger than the Illenium System, so Rey doesn’t bother to ask him what had soured his mood last night.

* * *

Rey catches herself staring at the wrists of incoming cadets and recruits.

There’s a moment where she hopes that Kaydel’s slim, pale wrist might bear the mark, but then the pretty lieutenant brushes hair out of Rey’s eyes with a laugh. When she pulls away, her sleeve riding up, there’s nothing there.

It irritates her, reminds her of what Poe said: she’s narrowing her options based on what the galaxy’s dictated for her. But, then she sees Kaydel and Jess kissing, and her mild disappointment flares down into calm, numb acceptance.

(She’d wanted it so badly to be Finn; but his mark is on his shoulder blade, having only barely escaped the blade of Ren, and he speaks of the mark with such painful optimism, that Rey doesn’t want to hurt their friendship by asking if he’d ignore their marks with her)

It’s fine. 

Poe and the pretty girl break up, or at least stop kissing in dark corners of the base. Rey continues to update BeeBee’s mods, cleans up the Falcon, runs missions for Leia with a rotating combination of Chewie, Finn, Poe, Rose, and Karé. She kisses a commander with dark, curly hair at an officer’s party, and it’s fine. She doesn’t kiss them more than once, but it was nice, kissing someone and being kissed.

She doesn’t need a soulmate: she has her lightsaber to build, and the obstacle course to conquer, and Leia to listen to. The ancient texts distract her, and soon, Rey only distantly traces the blur of scar tissue on her wrist where words used to be.

Poe continues to set her teeth on edge, especially as he’s been acting cagey for three months, since she caught him for the sixth time kissing the pretty-girl-he-no-longer-sleeps-with and scolded him.

_ “You can’t tell me who I can and can’t kiss, Jedi!”  _ He’d shouted, a strange guilt radiating off of him in waves.

_ “I don’t want to, I’m just saying that I don’t want to see it when I’m trying to meditate!”  _ Rey had shouted back, and they’d both shouted some more and stomped off in different directions.

Now, he stares at her sometimes from across the mechanic bay, which only makes her roll her eyes and focus on her work more. 

She trains with Finn and picks up more X-Wing tricks from Jess and Karé, and adopts a handful of clanking droids she’d fixed up when bored.

They avoid the First Order, and Rey studies the history of the Sith, and everything is fine. It’s fine.

She doesn’t need a soulmate; she’s beginning to think she doesn’t even want one. The only person who’s ever introduced themselves with The Words is someone who can barely stand her, and whom she can barely stand. It’s all going to be fine.

* * *

It stops being fine a year and three weeks after she joined the Resistance.

“I need the hydrospanner.” Poe points vaguely, his dark gloves a sharp contrast to the whiteness of his shirt.

“The hydrospanner?” Finn stares down at the toolbox while Rey snorts and returns to fiddling with the underbelly of her out of commission X-Wing.

“Yeah, the hydrospanner.” Poe laughs as Finn picks something up. “That’s a sub-loop spanner. I need a hydrospanner.”

“Hey man, I grabbed  _ a  _ spanner!” Finn digs around in the box. “Ha!”

Poe groans. “That’s just tape, buddy.”

“Bonding tape?” Rey asks, rolling out and sitting up, rubbing at the grease on her hands. She and Finn trade a conspiratorial grin at the inside joke.

“Hydrospanner?” Poe repeats, elbow deep in the front of the bird. “Hydrospanner. Hydrosp- yes!”

Finn holds up the correct tool and tosses it at Poe; Rey stands and wipes her hands on her leggings, going over to knock into Finn’s shoulder playfully as BeeBee-Ate whirls up to them, chattering away about its day.

“That’s great, buddy,” Poe says, right before sparks fly up from the panel he’s working in. “Ow! Shit! Mother-- Gah!”

Finn immediately grabs the emergency aid kit, and Rey rushes over to see if their best pilot is down a hand.

There’s a nasty looking burn on his forefinger, but that’s the extent of the damage. “Burn cream!” Rey says cheerfully over her shoulder while reaching for Poe’s wrist. “Here, let me-”

“No, wait-” Poe tries to tug away from her, but Rey rolls her eyes, unamused by whatever attempt at masculine toughness this is.

“Come here, we have to clean this ou-” Rey rolls his hand over to see if the burn covers his finger or just the top-side, and she freezes mid-sentence.

She can’t read much. No one ever bothered to teach her, and what she does read is limited to the audio-files C-3PO produced of the ancient texts she pilfered from Ahch-To. Rey doesn’t know what much of Aurebesh means.

But, she can recognize her own fucking name.

_ Rey  _ glares up at her from the inside of Poe’s tan wrist, where it had been snugly hiding under his gloves all afternoon.

“What?” She whispers, poking at the mark, wondering if it’s a prank. “What’s-”

“Don’t pretend like you didn’t know,” Poe begins, but Rey shakes her head and drops his hand, backing away. “Rey, wait-”

She turns and runs out of the hangar; the only thing that stops her from getting in her X-Wing and flying away is the fact that the person she never wants to see again is the person fixing her ship.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to everyone who reads Damerey and hasn't given up on me. I'd like to hear what you think of this universe idea, mostly because I miss having happy conversations about Star Wars. And, thanks to everyone who took the time to write a message of encouragement, it was really comforting.
> 
> Happy Friday


End file.
